Retirement, Take One
I write this about 100 days into retirement.
At first I kept a journal, numbered day by day, and I still do try to, although the surprising euphoria that arrived on Day One is starting to mellow a bit and I find myself starting to reflect. But still. Workers of the World, know this: I don't have to set the alarm clock! I can keep whatever hours I like! I have the money--not a lot, but I hope enough--and, best of all, I do not have to haul ass into an office any more. No more panty hose and heels. If I want, I can fritter away time, and so be it. Yes indeedy I have had a few Ebenezer Scrooge/Alistair Sim moments at the end of
A Christmas Carol, all unembarrassed giddiness and hilarity, happy dancing in the kitchen. Yes, more than once. And I do have two songs, or at least a line of the songs, to this new part of my life: singing R-E-T-I-R-E-D to Aretha Franklin's "Respect". Or I sing "Living on Sandy Time," to the tune of "Living on Tulsa Time".
Go me.
Let's just say this retirement gig is okay. So far, anyway.
Actually--touch wood--that is an understatement. Even if this is the honeymoon phase. And I do know that at some point the novelty will not seem as novel.
For me retirement was a process. I prepared for it the way I have approached a number of things: I thought and thought about it. (In fact, it is fair to say that for a few years I obsessed about it.) I read. The first book I read, summers ago, was
The Joy of Not Working, and the one line in the early pages that said I would not have to spend time with people I did not like justified the cost of the book and began my slow conversion to believing retirement might be worth doing. I read Carl Klaus'
Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary, and the collected Boston
Globe columns by Donald M. Murray on life after sixty,
My Twice-Lived Life: A Memoir. (Incidentally, they had both been mentors to me, one in Iowa and one in New Hampshire.) I read Carolyn Heilbrun's
The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty in which she mentions the comfort of not having to wear a dress or suit every day. I considered the happy prospect of life without meetings. I scrolled through blogs that always began with "Make sure you have enough money" even though there was no consensus as to what that amount should be. After the financials, the writers offered advice (and occasionally waxed rhapsodic) about volunteering, driving their RV from Walmart to Walmart, and going on what looked like high-end cruises. One blogger even detailed everything he did on a spreadsheet (time, place, costs), a task so beyond comprehension that I was momentarily speechless. My life in boxes: a mindset, along with the national triumph of corporate data over collegial dialectic, that I was deciding I wanted to leave behind.
Most of the well-intended helpful hints I read were not going to be for me, I knew, but I skimmed them anyway. I made the mistake of discovering the stock market app on my iPhone, but after a while I stopped obsessing about that, too. As time went on, my thinking was I might be able to do whatever floated my boat. For a change.
If I ever retired slowly became
when.
I tried to imagine my retirement: I could volunteer at the local humane society, but then I would come home bearing a new cat every week and maybe fleas as well. I could learn to cook. Read more. Write more. Maybe learn to swim. Travel not just for work or at the height of the tourist season. I thought for a year that I wanted a three season porch built on the back of my house, but when the time came, the last thing I wanted was a bunch of contractors pounding and clomping around for three weeks now that I was finally home and doing whatever I wanted (and pretty much only what I wanted, which means that I can appreciate how quiet my house really is--and how roomy it can be after I rearrange a little more). So the porch can wait. It was what I thought I wanted in the past, and maybe if it is less what I want now, perhaps that is because in some ways I was not who I was before. Preferences and interests change over time. How had I managed to forget that?
And I consulted friends who had already chosen to retire. Everybody declared they were "busier than I have ever been." Nobody looked sad. More importantly, everybody looked better than they ever had while working full-time. And when I was at my most-waffling-what-if stage, a friend made a very helpful point: "You need to remember that this is about Numero Uno."
And I was Numero Uno.
Maybe for the first time in a long time, or at least for the first time in the recent past.
And when I looked around at work, I realized that most of the people I had the greatest respect for--some of whom came of professional age with--were very likely on their way out the door (some happily, some less so) within a few years. We want to protect the things we love, but that collective thing, my work friends, our shared history and our joint projects and all they stood for, were going to be gone in five years at the most. Newbies courted by the institution did not have to pay the dues we had had to and had no history. Plus there were other changes to the institutional culture. (And, for the record, I know such changes are part of a national trend. The mindset is not only local.)
Or as another retired friend, one I have known since we were undergraduates, pointed out, in your childhood you do what your parents want you to do. Then as an adult you do what your job wants you to do. And then finally when you retire, you can do what you want to do. He had relocated to Mexico for the winter and returned to Boston for the summers. His email always sounded happy.
So although I have not yet bought the T-shirt that says "I don't want to/I don't have to/You can't make me/I'm retired", that thinking is part of my current mindset. If I want to paint my toenails purple, I will. Teal green fingernails. I can binge watch
Orange is The New Black (the last scene in the final episode is charming, not that that is a word I would use about the series as a whole as much as I enjoy it).
Doc Martin. Luther, Peaky Blinders. The Jewel in the Crown, which I had not seen since it was first broadcast in the 1980s. Thus far retirement offers a renewed opportunity for self-possession. I like it. I don't need a focus group; I do what I want to do when I want to do it. Although my container lettuce went to seed quickly and neighborhood critters killed my two post-retirement tomato plants, living once gain feels contentedly organic, as fluid as a late summer rainfall. I can go blueberry picking or to New York City. Or not. Or answer email or call my brother out of state right now. Let me put it this way: I can dare to eat a peach (and I have) or not. I have painted the new window frames and tended to everyday things pretty much as I need to, but this is all in a context of I DON'T HAVE TO.
The issue is choice.
There may be something to Live Free Or Die after all.
The movement I needed was on my shoulder.
As I was making the decision to retire, I framed a photo of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, leaving their formerly beloved place of work, and put it on the stairwell at home so I saw it every day, an Outta Here image if ever there was one. (Granted,
Abbey Road was not their final album, but then again it is likely I may work part-time, too, if only to see what it feels like and, frankly, to see how much I need the money.)
Emptying my office took several months, off and on. The early cleaning out was quite the stroll down memory lane, uncovering the old purple dittos of yesteryear stashed in the back of a file cabinet. The experience got more intense the longer it went on until I seemed to get whiplash from the time travel. File cabinets served as Way Back Machines: I marveled at all the names in the grade books, students mostly forgotten except for a few who were memorable for being excellent or, more likely, for being annoying. The former student who now manages the bank I frequent got a B, and one who showed up in my office at least once a week did finally get a C. I found essays students never bothered to pick up at the end of the semester. A lot of the student names meant nothing to me, I am afraid. No faces to go with a lot of the names--and in some cases I could remember faces but had no idea what the names were. I couldn't find the name of the student who had a
grand mal seizure in class, or that of the student whose first comment to me was "I am a congenital liar," to which I never thought to say (at the time), "Is that true?" Another had written "Writing is the confessional I never attended, the therapist I never leveled with, and the women I could never trust," a sentence I wish I had written--and he had written it over twenty years ago. I had remembered it over the decades.
I found the newsletters the remedial students wrote as assignments to introduce them to the college and the writing that the student-inmates in the prison program wrote. I taught in a college prison program for seven years, and when, as I was cleaning out, I checked the student-inmate names on the rosters I could find with the New York Department of Corrections website, I discovered that none of them had returned to a New York state prison.
This Wayback Machine travel was not a big Nostalgia Party. Allow me to digress: there were no Golden Days of Yesteryear. A colleague had a giant poster of Farrah Fawcett in her red bathing suit on his office door. One semester only the female English faculty had eight o'clock classes, but that stopped when we spoke up. There were about fourteen faculty who taught English full-time, but there were only three women including me, and when I asked why there weren't more, I was told "There weren't any who were qualified."
Well.
And the memos I found in the cabinets! The evaluations I wrote. The letters of support for promotions. The minutes of meetings that were either so general it was hard to tell what actually transpired or were detailed play-by-play. Matters decided, matters undecided. Discussion ongoing. Budget requests. Resumes. Curricula. Drafts and more drafts. Reports that probably nobody read but that had to be written per the institution. The lingo of the time: "student-centered," "goal-oriented," "excellence," "standards," "integrity," "team player." And so on. These days the lingo and the values have changed some to "strategic planning," "data-driven," "deliverables," "thought leader," "branding," and "elevator speech." You get the idea.
No wonder my eyes got tired from doing all that reading. No wonder I felt as if some of my brain cells had gone poof. No wonder I had burned out.
And how quickly the time had passed.
I threw out a lot. Some items I did not have to decide about right away, at least not yet, and those I put in a box labeled "Sentimental-->HOME". The prison writing, for instance. I would look through these boxes one more time before I stashed them in the garage, basement, or garbage can. For a change, I thought, I might have the time. And I had to find places for at least some of the framed photos I had taken during my travels, photos that had been on my office wall: Christo's wrapped Reichstag in Berlin; the three monks in the window in Luang Prabang, Laos; incense sticks from Thien Hau pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City, and the woman on the boat in Vietnam's Halong Bay. The photo of my friends and me on the beach. Santayana had been proven right: we live not on things but on the meaning of things.
I am still surprised at how relieved (and
relieved is not overstating it) I felt after I hauled many of my work clothes--suits, blazers, dresses, shoes with heels--to the Salvation Army. And as I was thinking about retirement--that is, as the decision got closer to being made--I had the presence of mind to stop buying clothes that were for work only, and instead I bought clothes that would also be retirement-ready, more sweaters and jeans.
It may be that preparing for retirement was far worse than retirement itself. But I tried to engineer a gentle transition for myself. When my watch stopped working a year before I retired, I never got a new battery for it. Right now it feels like late summer/early fall vacation but without limit: I don't have to rush to get the living room wall painted because I don't have to go back to work full-time. I have rearranged a few pieces of furniture here and there, and in an attempt to get more into a routine, I have started to get some exercise, going for a walk or two every day. Okay, so I can get up at eight in the morning rather than at six--a small change that feels positively luxurious at this point--but then I do know I need more structure to my days. I don't want to happily fritter as much as I did those first few days although I would prefer that things develop organically (albeit with the necessary nudge) as I get used to being retired. Let me put it this way: I do know that, for a change, I do finally have time to read the funnies and the obituaries (the obituaries, especially after you get beyond the local, are often the best writing in the major newspapers--the dead beat, if you will). Being accountable only to myself in a way I was not when I was working is not a small responsibility.
I do take a certain amount of heart from reading about people who made it into their nineties. But yes, accidents do happen and life is unfair, unfair, unfair. A friend of mine who died of cancer in his forties, long ago, probably the first person of my generation I ever knew who had cancer, told me of his diagnosis and singularly lousy prognosis: "I haven't wondered 'Why me?' because, really, why not me?"
I can measure the decades I have lived by who died when.
I am sure that to some of the millenials (but certainly not all) I was content to leave in the workplace I looked like a geezer, but aside from the odd ache and pain, I don't feel old. (I assume I am not the only person to ever finally get cajoled into attending a high school class reunion and then get there, look around and wonder, "Who invited all these old people?") And although there are fewer lines and less waiting at the supermarket on a weekday afternoon than I used to encounter after work, the place seems to be busy with people who look a lot older than I think I do.
About eight months before I retired, one day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my car was rear-ended as I was stopped at a light on my way to work. Five feet further and I could have been T-boned into cross-traffic, possibly into the Great Beyond. My parents died in their fifties; I outlived my mother nine years ago, my father seven years ago. I am told that although I take pills for genetic middle age ills--cholesterol and high blood pressure--they are the lowest, generic dosage and nothing to worry about. Carolyn Heilbrun was right: time is a gift.
Honeymoon period though this may be, I am surprised at how much I am enjoying this time. One of the very few decisions I made fairly early on in my life was that I wanted a job that provided a way of life--as naive as that sounds now. I didn't want a job that resulted in my coming home, sitting in the La-Z-Boy and watching television. The Quakers say "Work is love made visible," and I wanted that, too. I saw the value of Robert Frost's notion (and I am sure others have had the idea) of uniting vocation and avocation. This all worked for a while--a pretty good long while, actually. I was so happy, felt so damned lucky to be doing my job, that it didn't matter to me if on occasion I heard that people doing the same job in more upscale locations or even in other departments were making more money than I was. What I was doing, teaching writing, had meaning: I was making it possible for students to better learn how to follow and develop an idea, to develop a voice and locate themselves in the world through language. Many were the first in their families to go to college and few had any ideas about what their options might be besides flipping burgers at McDonald's. Learning how to write would not get them high-paying easy jobs, but at least the process of thinking things through was not a bad habit to have.
I loved what I was doing. I worked hard. I cared. Call this altruistic, naïve, green beyond belief, and even stupid. I have.
Only later, so gradually that I am not sure it was happening, did I come to realize that yes, money and equity did matter, and, after a while, maybe I wanted to be paid in more than in more work. By then (if ever) there was nothing much I could do about the situation if I wanted to keep my job. The powers that be were the powers that be.
I loved my jobs--all of them--and to some extent the jobs in their way did love me back. For a while. The work was its own reward. But as time passed, the jobs were no longer new. Politics, change, luck. Call it whatever. Newbies were courted and promoted. I got cranky. Eventually professionalism had its limits, and I found myself driving home hoping there was such a things as karma so that X would come back as a toadstool.
At the beginning of my career I had wanted to have time to do more reading and writing--not administrivia, not marginalia, but writing of my own. But as time passed I found myself coming home as often as not with a fried brain. I had a circle of friends, some (but not enough) free time, and a mortgage.
I had a house but no real room of my own.
I had become a writing teacher--and later, an administrator--and eventually I spent my time (
sans La-Z-Boy) using television as a post-work anesthetic. Not what I had planned. Granted, I was very fortunate to be able to do some of my work, at least for a while, on my own schedule. I never paid a cent for health insurance (but I do for Medicare) and I have a retirement plan: I know how fortunate I am to have those. Many years I worked only ten months. Later, the management style changed, but at least for a long time my jobs were with people I genuinely liked (although we often disagreed) and we all understood that part of our responsibility was to
have opinions and to engage (long before "engage" was a buzzword). As the national culture changed from the old school shared decision- making academic to the more corporate, experience counted for less. Institutional history was seen as mostly irrelevant (despite occasional protests to the contrary).
At least I never said "We tried that in 1990 and it didn't work" out loud, although I did think it a couple times. The new workplace seemed history-free (except for occasional lip service), although a mandatory in-house professional development session began with an ice breaker that required participants to line ourselves up according to seniority. After a while I realized that being among the most experienced (and the oldest) people in the room was getting, well, old. We are all dots in the matrix--I do get that part--but this was a matrix I did not want to be a part of any more. As I watched yet another Powerpoint that didn't seem to tell me anything I did not already know, I thought, "I have paid too many dues to have to listen to this shit." (On the bright side, I was never on the receiving end of what I think of as The Circle of Life Speech by a younger supervisor--that is, a slightly more oblique version of "Maybe after all these years, maybe it is time to move on, don't you think? Here's your hat. What's your hurry?")
I had served thirty-nine years. Outta there.
And somewhere in the zen office cleaning, I remembered what a colleague had observed about me a dozen years ago over a beer: that I had outgrown the place where I worked. At the time I agreed, but neither he nor I could think of a reasonable alternative. I did have to make a living.
What do you make of a diminished thing? Carry on, be professional, and see what else may be available. Put on a happy face and hope they don't know you're schizoid. I asked for slightly different responsibilities and was granted a few, but the basic work situation did not change. Looking back, I think Janis Joplin was right: "You are what you settle for."
And lately I have been thinking that Mad Dogs and Englishmen were also correct in "Space Captain": "We all forgot that we could fly." That is, I had.
And so once the money seemed to be in order, the people who had told me "You will know when it is time to retire" were proven right. It was time. I was very ready to retire. Declare victory and move on. Everybody kept telling me that I would love retirement.
Thus far the most difficult part of retiring except making the decision has been going against tradition and insisting: no retirement party. I let it be known that no, please, no party. I said it again and again: no party, no party. But I would be glad to have lunch or coffee or a beer with anyone--that is, my work friends--after the new semester starts once I make it through this retirement transition. We can get caught up and reestablish the friendship on new grounds. (A former colleague even asked our mutual hairdresser: "I heard Sandy is retiring, but after all those years the schools is not going to have a party for her?")
Why no party? I imagined retirement in part to be a moving on and a return to the genuine. Genuine: no platitudes. No bureaucratic generalities. No faux sincerity. Nothing that smacks of eulogy. (No roast, either.) At this point I have no patience with false sincerity, the kind of thing that comes with putting in the institutional CD and mouthing the words (an out-of-date metaphor, I know). I didn't want to have to go to a retirement party for me any more than I wanted to go to another meeting. Enough.
I wasn't even planning on moving house, for crying out loud. I was still going to be working part time (albeit online). I had paid enough dues. I was going to morph my strong work ethic into a retirement ethic. And in this ethic--mine--I can call bullshit. Even if only privately.
Nor was I dead. Not yet, anyway. Touch wood.
Lately retirement feels something like the best part of adolescence: that time when you do not know exactly,
exactly, what is going to happen next, but you do know--since, all things considered, you have been and are pretty lucky--that you have some choices and at least some means. And some time. Retirement may prove to be a time of fashioning or refashioning myself at least a little, a time of a certain reinventing--even as I am aware that in many ways I am who I am and am already formed: brown hair, blue eyes, introvert, bitchy resting face, over-educated for where I live, but funny, not shy about sharing opinions (and now with candor rejuvenated), a traveler with one very cool passport full of visas and stamps, and, in the past, a frustrated essayist. This is a kind of adolescence informed by adulthood. I no longer have to mouth management buzzwords or speak in pop culture psychobabble. I have time to revise and rewrite.
Still, there may prove to be other options I didn't feel I had even a hundred days ago. Someone said about me when I was an undergraduate: "Give her a piece of string and she can play with it all day." True then and true now, mostly. I do like to think about things. So at this point, given time and space, I am content to land in, to dwell in, my new-adolescent version of John Keats' notion of negative capability: "when a man [sic] is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason".
I can unclench. I can relax.
In the moments when I am not doing an Alistair Sim happy dance, I can, well, just enjoy.
Most writing teachers teach the importance of clear subjects and verbs, and those parts of speech are important, but to me the connectives--e.g.
and, but, because, although, since,
then and such--have always seemed to me at least as important, if not more so, because, finally, they are how we put things together--not only ideas but also the stuff of our lives. And so I am aware that, Keats and retirement funds notwithstanding, I still live in a material world that includes doing the laundry, taking cholesterol pills and deliberately getting exercise in part to ward off mental decline. (I come from a long line of list-makers, so only rarely do I feel as if I am forgetting something.) Since I tend to be home more often than in the past, I realize sooner than before that the litter box needs cleaning. I have also noticed that I am taking out loud to myself more than I used to: "Where did I put my iPhone?" (On the charging dock.) I have always spoken to my cats, so I will not worry about that until I find myself believing they are answering me in English. But the possible (I think) new normal for me lacks the impatience of my first adolescence--the wanting-to-hurry-up-to-be-a-grown-up-part even though ironically enough no doubt these days my years are more limited than they were when I was, say, fifteen. In my case all this does come with a certainty of sorts--or call it crank: I have no patience for millennial (and other) solipsism and the varieties of celebrity culture. There are things to be said for spending time with people with the same frame of reference. At this point I do know some things even if my ideas change along the way.
I do know, however, that this time, during this adolescence, I am not sleeping in rollers.
The first thing I did when I got my first full-time teaching job, one thousand miles away from where I grew up, was to adopt an orange and white kitten, one I named Rudder, daughter of Motorboat. (This was on the banks of the Mississippi.) Since then I have lived with generations of house cats.
The cats I have never tired of. For the past hundred days I have been spending as much time with them as I used to with the people at work--and more. The cats are my familiars, and in some ways I would not mind much of in my next life I came back as pampered a house cat as Doodle, Moonbeam and Swishy are.
Moonbeam the calico has always been a drama queen. I adopted her nine years ago from the humane society, and the story was that her previous family brought her in because she was pregnant and they would not be able to afford kittens. But then she miscarried and I found her crouched in the back of her metal cage; with some coaxing, she was willing to nose-touch my finger through the bars. Calicos are known for being quirky, I now know, and she is, although initially I thought she was just suffering from post-miscarriage sloshing hormones. But Moonbeam is lunar--moody, picky, a cat of little reason and a lot of attitude. Although she is a lap cat, she has always been high maintenance, a "me, me, me" cat compared to Doodle, a ginger tabby, a mellow big moosey guy, a linebacker of a cat, a snoozer, adopted when Moonbeam was. Swishy I adopted two years ago, a long-haired, long tailed cat that the humane society could not find a home for since she was adult, black, and had only one eye. I thought she was cool. She needed a home.
Moonbeam is the cat who slept at the foot of my bed and used to let me know when it was time to get up and get ready for work by walking on me. For years she followed me into the shower at six in the morning and sat on the corner of the sink. Her job was to keep me company. Or maybe she was supervising.
But my retirement has changed her routine, it appears. I do my best to get up by eight. I go to bed when I feel like it. I am home more than usual, and no doubt that small rearranging of furniture that came with retirement and the boxes of books that were parked in the living room before being relocated changed her geography, too. I left my office, my location for 35+ hours a week, to move home which to her must feel like full time, pretty much. I mean, I invaded her space.
Time and space.
A few weeks ago when she went to the veterinarian for her annual visit, the vet discovered that she had lost a little more than a pound. Since she was only nine pounds to begin with, that was a lot.
I was concerned but nowhere near as upset as I would have been had I still had full-time work responsibilities. I did not panic the way I might have a month or two sooner.
So there were tests: blood tests. X-rays. A fourteen hour fast followed by urine tests.
Forty-eight hours later: everything tested within normal range.
And then the process of elimination began. Has anything changed? the vet asked. What could be the cause of this? Moonbeam Drama Queen was eating in her usual picky fashion and she was sleeping a good eighteen hours a day. In some ways, the cats had their own separate places to snooze, but they were also doing, as they always did, what looked like kitty time sharing of the furniture. But I was home more often, in her space, and the schedule was not what it had been. I was living on Sandy Time, after all, not on Moonbeam Time.
So some days, now that the novelty is not as novel, I try to get up even a few minutes earlier than I did a hundred days ago, and when I do, Moonbeam does accompany me to the shower. When I put wet cat food on my fingers, she can be persuaded to eat a little more than she might otherwise.
I have discovered that I actually have time to think, and maybe it is good if in some ways this new adolescence never ends. I have time and space, for a change, to take at least some of the time to think and rethink, to write and rewrite, to travel inside and outside of my head to wherever I want.
And I like being able to believe--in better, quieter moments--in this retirement adolescence, now that I finally have time and space for the first time in a long time--that, one way or another, everything will all work out.
September 2015
Copyright Sandra Engel
